Middle Eastern perceptions of modern American theopolitics

Found a paper that doesn't quite fit the editorial policies of my "Political Theology Agenda" blog, i.e. it hasn't been published yet. I don't include there unpublished papers from online repositories, not least because authors of such papers often don't want that anyone cites from them before they get published in a journal anyway.

However, this one is striking enough to warrant a mention at least here. It's a paper that was given at a Faith and Public Policy Seminar at King's College London on 21 April 2009, titled "America as a Jihad State: Middle Eastern perceptions of modern American theopolitics". The author is Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad (aka Timothy Winter; Lecturer of Islamic Studies at Cambridge). We got used to viewing the Middle East, from a western perspective, in terms of "theopolitics". This attempt at turning the tables on us may be fairly unique, though.

The full text is available here:

www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/America-as-a-jihad-state.htm

Some excerpts: "Only two weeks ago, in the Sahara desert near Timbuktu, I listened to a wholly traditional Sufi leader expound the view that America's violence towards the Muslim world is the consequence of a sahwa misihiyya, a Christian revival. He was well-aware of the role of the Christian Coalition in the run-up to the Iraq war, despite living in a region where I saw no newspapers, and where internet access is almost impossible. Yet he was familiar with the names of Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, and other icons of the Christian Right. [...]

"[A]n article by Jaafar Hadi Hassan in [the Lebanese-rooted newspaper] al-Hayat in 2003 [...] summarises the core passages of the [biblical] Book of Revelation which are central to the [apocalyptic]
world-view of the so-called theocons. Much of Revelation, he writes, is ambiguous, but the role of Iraq in the end-time scenario is clear: Iraq, or 'Babylon', will fill the nations with impurity; and an angel of God's wrath will bring it to destruction, and it will be divided into three parts – exactly what America has achieved. [...] The environmental crisis is a positive sign that the present world is coming to an end; and this explains, for Hassan, American indifference towards the Kyoto Protocols. [...]

"While takfiri Salafi formations such as those which self-identify as al-Qaida are content to use generic terms such as 'crusading' to account for American interventions in the Muslim world, and offer simple accounts of the power of the Jewish lobby over Christians paralyzed with guilt over the Holocaust, mainline Islamism can adopt a slightly more analytic view. [...] [W]hereas ten years ago Muslims tended to view America as a secular republic containing many religious Christians, the perception is now gaining ground that America is a specifically Christian entity, whose policies on Israel, and whose otherwise mystifying violence against Muslims, whether in occupied countries or in detention, can most helpfully be explained with reference to the Bible."